Finalist: The Star-Ledger, by Mark Di Ionno

Troy Bradshaw is not a violent man.

 

He has sat quietly, almost impassive, for two years now, listening over and over and over to details of the Mount Vernon School murders.

 

"I know the streets, but I’m not from the streets," said the father of victims Natasha and Terrance Aeriel.

 

But testimony by Shahid Baskerville in the trial of Jose Carranza about how they sexually humiliated and violated Natasha had Troy Bradshaw doing the math.

 

"I admit I was sitting there thinking, ‘Let’s see, Baskerville gets out in 30. He’ll be — what? — 50-something, and I’ll be 73. I’ll still be good,’" Bradshaw said. "Yeah, I’ll still be good. And I got some nephews if I’m not ... I better not say anything else that might incriminate me."

 

Baskerville, as part of his plea deal, is going to prison for 30 years. But all Troy Bradshaw wants is 30 minutes. With Baskerville, alone.

 

"That’s all I’d need," he said. "Maybe less."

 

Same for Carranza, whose fate was being deliberated by a jury in Newark for the second day Thursday.

 

"What I don’t understand is this guy has his mother, girlfriend and other women in court for every day," Bradshaw said. "He has women in his life. How could he treat my daughter like that?"

 

Bradshaw’s fighting words were not said with anger. He is not that kind of guy. Quite the opposite.

 

Through three trials and two plea agreements, Bradshaw has not flashed anger or whispered hate after listening to testimony by his daughter, who was hacked, sexually assaulted, shot in the face and left for dead.

 

He has not had an emotional outburst or shed a silent tear as she struggled to control her facial movements and speech as she recalled the night her brother, her best friend, Iofemi Hightower, and another lifelong friend, Dashon Harvey, were executed, just like that.

 

The last time I saw the kid from Tupelo, he needed about 50 stitches.

 

Paul Thorn was in the fighters' dressing room at The Trop in Atlantic City, and a local EMT was strongly advising Thorn's uncle and trainer, Eddie, that the stitch work should be done by someone more qualified, like a plastic surgeon.

 

The rip in his forehead wasn't the problem. It was the lip. It looked like it had been sheared with a serrated scissors, right up to the nostril.

 

And that's when Eddie Thorn delivered this memorable line: "It wasn't bad at first, then it just ran like nylon."

 

This was in April 1988, and Thorn was just stopped on cuts by one of the greatest boxers of all time.

 

What has happened to Paul Thorn since gives him this very unique claim to fame: He's opened for Sting and fought Roberto Duran.

 

"Yeah, I guess not many people can say that," he said.

 

These days, the man from Tupelo is doing what you'd expect a man from Tupelo to be doing. He's on stage, just him and a guitar, playing music. A little rockabilly, a little country Gospel, a little Baptist rhythm & blues, some shot-and-beer folk, all Deep South soul.

 

Mostly he travels by van, criss-crossing the country a hundred times, getting paying gigs wherever he can, selling his CDs, T-shirts, even a book of original art. It’s been that way for 20-some years and 10 albums, now. The people he’s opened for, you heard of — Sting, Bonnie Raitt, Mark Knopfler, John Prine, plenty others — but Thorn is still making his name.

 

"I'm a known musician, not a well-known musician. I'm picking up fans, two or three, a night," said Thorn, who performs tonight in The Sanctuary Concert Series in Chatham. "I'd rather do that than pick up a million overnight, because by morning, they’ll forget you. The two or three I get, I keep."

 

Thorn comes to Chatham as part of the “Soul Salvation Tour” with Grammy-nominee Ruthie Foster. Salvation, and likewise themes, run deep through his music and artwork. The cover of his album “Pimps & Preachers” is an original painting of characters, whose lives intersect in church and on street corners.

 

Thorn’s father was a Pentecostal minister and, as a kid, he spent a lifetime on hardwood benches absorbing the music that would shape his sound, and the style that would shape his performance.

 

"My father was a people person and I’m very much that way," he said. "After every show, I hang around and shake hands with the audience and thank them all for coming. I love meeting people, and I’ll stay till the last one leaves."

 

In that way, he’s always been a crowd-pleaser, even back in the day when his stage was a ring, because Paul Thorn always came to fight. The night he fought Duran, he was a 13-3 club fighter, barely shaving, and Duran was already a three-time world champ, headed for his fourth.

 

What Duran did to Thorn was predicted, but no one expected Thorn to bust up Duran like he did. He had a wound in his scalp that gushed, a deep cut on his left eyelid that spurted like some slasher film effects.

 

I was a sportswriter for the New York Post back then and wrote that "referee Randy Neumann’s shirt looked like it had been worn during a 12-hour shift at a slaughterhouse."

 

Paul Thorn keeps that clip on his website. It was the highlight of a boxing career that lasted three more fights, all wins.

 

"I always say I didn’t quit boxing, because I don’t quit anything. I just took it as far as I could take it. I was good, but I was never going to be an elite fighter."

 

So he moved on. Or backward, depending how you look at it.

 

"Music was always there for me," he said. "When I was a kid, of course, I idolized Elvis, but I had a poster of Roberto Duran in my room."

 

"When I fought him, it was good going against great. I realized he had the ability to relax under pressure and I was scared. The difference was this: he believed in himself and I doubted myself."

 

And so he moved to the arena where he, too, could believe in himself. Him, his guitar, and enough people to listen, and maybe enough to pay the bills.

 

"I'm always comfortable on stage," Thorn said. "I'm in my element. Really, it's the only thing I can do. It's my life. So I'm still out here, paying my own way."

Dharun Ravi’s face is drawn and thin. The stress of the last yearand a half has wrung him out. His eyes are perpetually sad, not the eyes of a very bright 20-year-old young man who should have a promising future.

 

He is sitting on a plush maroon sofa in his parents’ living room, free on bail but still a prisoner in public opinion. He has been convicted of a hate crime for spying on Tyler Clementi, who jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge after the episode. Ravi was not charged in Clementi’s death, but without the suicide, the case would have never drawn so much public attention.

 

Now, for the first time, Dharun Ravi explains his side of the story in a two-hour exclusive interview with The Star-Ledger.

 

I’m not the same person I was two years ago," he said. "I don’t even recognize the person I was two years ago."

 

That person, Ravi admits, was immature. And did some stupid things. And was insensitive to Tyler Clementi’s feelings.

 

"But I wasn’t biased," Ravi said. "I didn’t act out of hate and I wasn’t uncomfortable with Tyler being gay."

 

And this person is committed to continuing to try and prove he did not commit a bias crime.

 

"The verdict actually made me feel energized," he said. "We (his family, friends and attorneys) will keep going."

 

In September of 2010, after Clementi committed suicide, it was quickly learned that Ravi spied on Clementi while he had a male guest in their Rutgers’ freshman dorm room. The story exploded on the national conscience as a case of homophobic cyberbullying, and Ravi was cast as the arch-villain.

 

Last Friday, after a month-long trial in which Ravi did not testify in his own defense, he was convicted of all 15 counts of privacy invasion, investigation tampering and bias intimidation. He faces a 10-year jail term, with sentencing set for May 21. Prior to the trial, he turned down a plea deal that would have kept him out of jail. But he had to admit to charges of bias intimidation.

 

"I’m never going to regret not taking the plea," Ravi said emphatically. "If I took the plea, I would have had to testify that I did what I did to intimidate Tyler and that would be a lie. I won’t ever get up there and tell the world I hated Tyler because he was gay, or tell the world I was trying to hurt or intimidate him because it’s not true."

 

* * *

 

"If it was a girl who came to the room and she looked as strange as M.B., I would have done the same thing," he said.

 

The issue, he says, was M.B.

 

When Rutgers police first came to his room because Tyler was missing, Ravi said he feared "it had something to do with M.B."

 

"I thought it was something sinister, that maybe he got mixed up with the wrong guy," Ravi said. "I told one of my friends, ‘I wish I recorded (the first incident, on Sept. 19) so I would have an image of the guy (M.B.) to give to the police."

 

* * *

 

On the night of the first incident, Ravi’s co-defendant, Molly Wei, testified they only watched the webcam images for scant seconds, then shut it down when they saw the men were kissing. Ravi’s defense has always been that he was worried about his iPad and other stuff in his room when he saw M.B., who looked "shady" to him.

 

Wei later opened up the camera for a second view, which was seen by about five people. Ravi today said he was not in the room for that second view, in which the men were still kissing but shirtless.

 

On the second night, Sept. 21, Ravi said he was at dinner when Tyler texted him asking for the room again.

 

"I thought it was weird he was asking for the room again on a weekday," Ravi said today. "I didn’t mind because I knew I had (ultimate) Frisbee practice, but I remember thinking, if this is going to be every other day, it’s going to be a problem. But I didn’t want to confront him because it was already difficult to talk to him."

 

Ravi says the tweet he sent to friends suggesting they tune into his webcam to see Clementi with M.B. was a joke, but one in which he severely underestimated the effect on Tyler.

 

"I knew my friends would think it was a joke because they know my sense of humor," he said. "But eventually I thought it was stupid, so I went back into the room and pointed the camera back at my bed."

 

Asked this question, "What were you thinking?" Ravi candidly stated, "I wasn’t."

 

"At that point, I got caught up in what I thought was funny, and my own ego."

 

Known as a computer whiz among his friends, Ravi admitted he was trying to show off.

 

ATLANTIC CITY — Bill Terrigino loves his home. Ocean views, salt-air breezes, a cherry blossom tree that flowers this time each year. Each dawn, he goes to his third-floor picture window to watch the horizon get repainted with an array of purples, pinks and oranges from God’s palette.

 

"You never get tired of seeing it," he said.

 

It’s just one benefit of his seaside neighborhood.

 

"It’s so nice here, the guy next door spent $2.4 billion to move in," he said.

 

The guy next door is Revel, which officially opened Monday. It’s a 6.3-million-square-foot, towering, mirrored palace of geometric shapes and angles that looms over Terrigino’s 105-year-old seaside Victorian, which is still sided with the original cedar shakes.

 

These neighbors — across this little stretch of South Metropolitan Avenue, as it dead-ends at the sand — are a composite sketch of Atlantic City’s future and past.

 

On one side is the latest savior casino to rise from the boardwalks and back bays of Atlantic City.

 

On the other is the last beach house, one of the few remaining private homes on an ocean block in all of Atlantic City, and the only one clinging to a nautical theme.

 

On one side are 1,898 luxurious rooms and suites, pampering spas, two theaters, two night clubs, 10 pools, and 14 restaurants run by "celebrity chefs" like Jose Garces and Marc Forgione.

 

On the other side are the people who work in those places. Bill and Cathy Terrigino are on the banquet staff at another resort.

 

MOUNTAIN LAKES — The kids went back to school Monday, piling through doors they decorated over spring break. Some of the signs had blown away, swept off by a week’s worth of mild, breezy weather, but there was no rain to speak of so their words were still intact and legible, their messages now 10 days old.

 

Outside those doors, dried flowers and small stones painted with messages were moved aside, out from underfoot. The kids were back in the old stone-and-brick Tudor building, where footsteps echo down granite halls when class in session, and where the shrill racket of middle-schoolers bounces off plaster walls when class is not.

 

The building was full again, yet empty in a way that only adults should have to understand. But the kids at Briarcliff School in Mountain Lakes now know, too. They got a hard lesson on their week of vacation.

 

Their principal, Mr. Cera — Marco Cera to people outside the school — died on Good Friday, the first day of spring break. He was 39.

 

Death, to most young teenagers, is for old people. Grandmas and grandpas. On the timeline of expected life, Marco Cera left too early, and too abruptly, and under circumstances that are hard to comprehend even for grownups. He came to the school just 14 months ago — young and vital — and became an immediate force, ever-present in the halls, at the concerts and science and book fairs, at the team events. A few months later, this man who never worked in heavy industry or a shipyard, was diagnosed mesothelioma, an asbestos-related lung cancer. The news was as perplexing as it was devastating as it was unnerving. Especially to sixth-, seventh- and eight-graders. He was younger than their parents, and had children younger than them.

 

Mr. Cera fought if off and hardly missed a day of school at first. There was treatment at Sloan-Kettering, an operation to remove lung lining. Still he was in the building; strong, optimistic, hovering over the kids, meeting with their parents.

 

MONTCLAIR — Colleen Fay didn’t know much about Pfc. Kenneth Brown when she noticed his headstone being overrun by an oak tree trunk. The cross, the words "Marine" and "World War II" and the death date, 1944, told her enough.

 

"I thought, ‘Here’s a guy who gave his life for his country. He deserves better,' " she said.

 

The odd coupling of stone and tree not only put her on a mission to get Brown a new marker, but raised her curiosity about the man buried there, and those he left behind.

 

This is the effect of cemetery wandering, which Fay, an orthopedic surgeon admits she likes to do. All those names, and dates from different times, evidence of personal histories. Colleen Fay wanted to know Kenneth Brown’s. It took a few years to unravel, but what she found was a love story of profound tragedy and inspiration.

 

"It’s sad and beautiful at the same time," she said.

 

* * *

 

The trunk of the tree that embraces Brown’s marker is shaped a little like a heart, a heart split in half by the stone.

 

It is the perfect metaphor for this story, because the broken heart belongs to the girl he left behind, the girl who loved him as she grew old alone, the girl who loved him till the day she died.

 

Kenny Brown was a Montclair boy, so moved by the attack on Pearl Harbor, he left high school in his junior year to join the Marine Corps. He was 17 when he enlisted the day before Christmas, 1941.

 

Claire Smith was only 15 when Kenny Brown left their Wildwood Avenue neighborhood for the Corps. She was friends with his little sister, Betty Ann, and lived a few doors down.

 

Commandant Timothy Daudelin of the Saddle River Detachment came out and arranged for a new headstone, which was donated by monument maker Scott Rullis, whose father was a Marine. They planned a dedication ceremony.

Fay then set out to find family members of Brown, to invite them to the ceremony. It was then that she found out about the mystery woman.

 

* * *

 

The woman visited often, for seven decades, leaving Easter flowers and Christmas wreaths and Memorial Day flags. Sometimes she came with another woman, but mostly alone. Sometimes she spoke to cemetery caretakers, who told Fay about her.

 

Fay investigated. It wasn’t Brown’s sister. She moved away and had since died. The nieces Kenneth Brown never knew were in Florida.

 

It was in a conversation with a childhood friend of Kenny Brown named Stuart O’Brien she first heard the name Claire Smith.

 

"She spent her whole life with him in her heart," O’Brien said.

 

* * *

 

There were no candles, balloons, or handmade signs of sorrow. There was no endless stream of mourners, no television cameras.

 

Yes, there are people who weep for Terence Tyler.

 

Plenty.

 

The troubled discharged Marine, who killed two co-workers with an assault rifle and then turned a handgun on himself 10 days ago at the Old Bridge Pathmark, comes from a large, extended family that lives in and around the Brownsville and Bedford-Stuyvesant sections of Brooklyn. N.Y.

 

Sunday evening, they gathered in one of the small parlor rooms at the John Funeral Home in Brooklyn. The dark casket was open, with a simple arrangement of white roses blanketing the closed half. On a nearby table was an official Marine Corps portrait of him, dressed in fatigues.

 

It was a subdued, lonely service. Their brother, nephew and cousin was the perpetrator of a multiple public murder, the senseless kind that appalls a community, and sometimes a nation. He is a sympathetic figure only to those who knew him.

 

“Something was going on inside him,” his uncle, Christopher Dyson said. “He was in some kind of pain. He caused a lot of pain, a real lot of pain, but he must have been in a lot of pain, too.”

 

SEASIDE HEIGHTS — The most enduring image of Sandy’s destruction is the slightly twisted wreck of steel that was a Seaside Heights roller coaster, sitting in the ocean.

 

The Star Jet coaster didn’t collapse in pieces during the storm. The pier below it was washed out in a fell swoop, and the coaster fell, almost intact. It was Sandy’s version of a tablecloth trick.

 

The other large amusement rides at Seaside Heights did not fall with such grace. They came down in jagged heaps, of broken metal stabbing the air.

 

"When I turned the corner and saw this the first time, you know what I thought? Nine-eleven," Thomas Boyd, the Seaside Heights police chief, said Wednesday as he surveyed the damage.

 

He was quick to add he didn’t mean to minimize the loss of life from the terror attacks.

 

But those images of destruction ... seeing something you can’t quite believe, yet know you will never forget. Seeing devastation so complete, you forget what the place looked like whole, even if was only a day ago.

 

That is what the Seaside Heights boardwalk looks like today.

 

The place visited by millions every summer for a century has been turned into scrap metal.

 

"There are a lot of good memories in this place," Boyd said, speaking for generations of tourists, and himself.

 

He was born and raised in Seaside Heights and his family ran the beach patrol from 1933 to 1993. He was a lifeguard, and his brother, Hugh, is now chief of the lifeguards. His wife’s family once owned the Carousel Arcade and his brother-in-law owns the Beachcomber restaurant.

 

"This place is in my blood. I love this town," he said. "I have to tell you, looking at all this has filled me with grief."

 

The happy signs for places like Kohl’s Frozen Custard and The Magical Carousel Gift Shop are stained black from asphalt shingles ripped from roofs and strewn around the boardwalk like Labor Day litter.

 

In some places, the boardwalk is buckled, and fall and heaves like a funhouse floor or bumpy kiddie ride (or like the "Jersey Shore" cast after a night at Karma). In some places, the planks are ripped off, and tossed, nails up, against the shuttered pizza parlors and ice cream stands. In that jumble of boards are pieces of pink insulation, aluminum siding and soggy stuffed animals that washed out of broken arcades.

 

Underneath, the pilings are either broken or weakened.

 

"If we drove a patrol car up here right now, the boardwalk would collapse," Boyd said. "The real problem is underneath."

 

The Star Jet was at the end of the Casino Pier. The rest will probably have to come down, as most of the telephone pole-sized piling have been knocked crooked by the storm surge.

 

At the Carousel Arcade, the merry-go-round was enclosed and survived, but owner Bob Stewart lost 200 feet of pier over the ocean.

 

Stewart, a volunteer fireman who helped evacuate residents during the storm, rode up on a scooter Wednesday to survey the damage.

 

The wreckage will be cleared, the sand pushed back where it belongs.

 

New boards will be nailed down, new pavilions constructed. The barrier islands will be re-overbuilt, just like always. And sometime before Memorial Day, Gov. Christie will announce, "The Jersey Shore is open for business."

 

It has to be.

 

The Jersey Shore generates most of the state’s $38 billion tourism industry.

 

And it will be.

 

Because it is our most valuable resource, natural and otherwise, on levels that go so much deeper than money. The ocean is soothing, when not raging. The shore breezes cool us, when not uprooting us. It is our playground, when not leveled. It is our claim to fame, in good times, and, now, in very bad.

 

Here’s another claim: We took Mother Nature’s best shot, and we’re still standing.

 

In Newark, where the state’s largest city stared down its greatest emergency since 1967. In Hoboken and Jersey City, where urbanites stepped over the river running through their streets.

 

In the suburbs, where hardwood trees and utility poles snapped and fell together in a tangle of wires, we’re still standing.

 

In the Raritan Bay area, where typhoon winds pushed high tide to record heights and sent ocean-like waves crashing over seawalls and bulkheads.

 

In our dark, cold homes and our gas lines and long waits at whatever food store or restaurant has power, we’re still standing.

 

Maybe Christie said it best.

 

"This is the kind of thing New Jerseyans are built for — we’re plenty tough and now we have a little more reason to be angry after this."

 

And so the fight back has begun. It started as soon as the sun came up Tuesday morning.

 

At the shore, the front-end loaders and dump trucks came right behind the search-and-rescue squads, to take away boardwalk sections and broken homes. Pumps are pulling the sea from the streets. Sand is being plowed, like snow, back to the beach. Giant industrial sifters will come and cleanse it of small debris.

 

"I don’t know how we’re ever going to clean this all up," said Thomas Boyd, the Seaside Heights police chief, as he stood on a 5-foot sand mound in the middle of Route 35. "But we’re going to start."

 

In front of him was a yellow Cape Cod, broken in three sections, one of thousands upon thousands of homes destroyed or damaged in the 12-hour height of Sandy’s fury. A few blocks away, the storm’s violence turned two amusement piers on Seaside Heights’ famed boardwalk into a trash heap of splintered wood and twisted metal, the stunning effect of Mother Nature’s best shot.

 

Bob Stewart, who owns the Carousel Arcade between the two piers, is going to rebuild.

 

"We started with nothing. So, we’ll start over with nothing."

 

He, like the rest of us, is still standing, at the start of the long road back.